News from Spoonflower about custom fabric printing, sewing, crafters and crafting. The official blog of Spoonflower.com, a service that prints custom fabric on-demand.

March 2012

March 29, 2012

The competition this week is for cut & sew patterns that, when printed on a full yard of fabric, can be used to make your own bag. The entries -- all 75 of them -- show an amazing amount of diversity and creativity. Enjoy voting! We'll show you the winners next week.

The top ten fabrics from this week's contest are headed for an exhibit at the Textile Center in Minneapolis, where jurors will select their favorite for a grand prize. The people's choice in our voting was Canadian designer Cynthia Frenette's "Take the Detour Route," but all of the top ten offer terrific spins on the contest theme, which centered on the transformation of an urban neighborhood using selected photos as inspiration.

Keeping in mind that this contest consisted of a juried group of designs to begin with and that the top prize is actually going to be selected by judges from the Textile Center, the top ten designers are:

March 28, 2012

I've been a big fan of Rashida Coleman-Hale for quite awhile. Writer of the iheartlinen blog, Rashida has a clean aesthetic and a clever project sensibility that I just love. Rashida recently released her Washi fabric collection through Timeless Treasures, and sells other charming fabrics through Spoonflower that incorporate love letters, quirky vessels, and more washi tape as design elements. She's also the author of two sewing books on zakka projects, I Love Patchwork: 21 Irresistible Zakka Projects to Sew and the new Zakka Style. We just found out this morning that Lindsey of LRStitched and Amy of Sukie have put together a Zakka Stylesewalong/blog tour that begins this Monday, 4/2.

We're a little late with our giveaway of Rashida's Zakka Style, but don't let that stop you from participating in the sewalong--or from entering the drawing for this fantastic project book! To sweeten the deal, we'll also throw in two yards of our linen/cotton canvas printed with the Rashida Coleman-Hale Spoonflower design (or two designs) of your choice. You know the drill, right? To enter this drawing, just comment on this post or on the corresponding Facebook post and please be sure to include your Spoonflower screen name so we can track you down easily. Entries close next Tuesday, 4/3 at 7 pm EST, and we'll announce a winner on 4/4. Good luck, everyone! This entry is now closed, and we'll be announcing a winner tomorrow. Thanks, all!

Last week's winner of three awesome books about pattern design was Gergana Mollova in San Francisco, no slouch in the design department herself. Congratulations, Gergana!

March 27, 2012

We're nearing the end of our Meet Spoonflower series and this week, I'm introducing you to Thomas Midgett, one of our third-shift printers. Maybe it's because I seldom see Thomas in the office--or maybe it's because he's just a really interesting guy who grew up in a city I love--but I particularly enjoyed this interview. I hope you do, too!

I was born in Durham Regional Hospital and have lived in Durham all my life save for a year and a half I spent in Savannah, Georgia. Growing up in Durham has always been interesting. I went to a hippie Quaker (they don't like war; they do like electricity) school in Orange County through middle school. Most of the kids I went to school with were from Chapel Hill or the more country, upscale outskirts of Durham and, as the only kid in the school that lived five minutes from downtown, I felt like a gangster. It’s no NYC but back when I was younger, Durham was far more troubled than it is now. “Murder Mile” and “Five Points” (the original one) were all minutes from my house. Concerned parents kept their kids from sleepovers at my house, and my dad got his car broken into a lot.

All these things created a kind of cautious respect and pride for Durham. It was grittier than Chapel Hill or Carrboro and I liked that 90% of the time. When I transitioned to high school, I made the decision to go to Durham School of the Arts, a lottery entry public arts school. Going from a 30 student, private hippie colony to, in my mind, a “real” public school was daunting. I had lived in Durham my whole life but had always been a little bit of an outsider. Sure I got to claim it as my own when people from Chapel Hill asked if my house had bars in the windows (it didn’t), but it was a whole different thing to go to school within walking distance of my house. High school was my first real exposure to Durham on my own, and it was amazing. By this point, downtown was being revamped and my senior prom was held in one of the old tobacco warehouses that had been abandoned for most of my life. I’m happy Durham is where it is now. It’s not as dangerous as it used to be and the culture that came along with all the changes hasn't completely destroyed all the great old things in Durham. I wouldn’t want to have grown up anywhere else, and I certainly wouldn't want to live anywhere else! (No Spoonflower L.A.!)

I was such a nerd in elementary and middle school. Card games, comic books, and video games were my everything. My interest in Japanese manga and culture eventually led to me to doing Aikido and Aikikai, both relatively new forms of martial arts. That’s one of the many things I wish I’d never stopped doing. It was a great experience to roll around on a mat and get shown daily that no matter how good you are at something, someone -- usually the 45-year old 5’1” ginger British lady -- will always manage to fling you across the room.

The first real job I had was working in high school as a professional nerd at Gamestop. It was at that point my dream job, but the long hours and difficult customers made me reconsider what I counted as a dream job pretty quick. It was a great introduction to the working world, though. They had me do everything during my time there -- stocking shelves, selling people reserves and subscriptions, closing and opening registers. Everything I did there was always difficult, but I learned a lot from it. My co-workers and I also managed to have a lot of fun, everything from copying Super Troopers and trying to say meow as many times as we could without getting caught, to coming up with creative code words to communicate what we thought of people on the sly and playing PSP games in the back of the store. All rewarding, productive work activities for me at age 17.

By the time I returned to Durham from Savannah I had developed an interest in fashion. I immediately let everyone know by wearing skinny jeans and talking about the person that made my $80 T-shirt. Eventually the over-spending and bragging faded, but my interest in fashion culture and design did not. At the time, I was working as a photo retoucher for a locally based canvas company and wasn’t terribly happy. It was a dead-end, unrewarding job that I had no real interest in. (One can remove only so many boogers from photographs before the insanity starts to get hold of you.) I heard about Spoonflower from a friend’s mother who happened to know Gart. She knew my job at the time gave me the right skill set and that my interests aligned with what Spoonflower was doing. She also knew how much I disliked the job I was at and that I was looking for something that would interest me more, something that gave me more than a paycheck. So far Spoonflower has been a blast. Third shift is hard, but working at such a great place more than makes up for it!

One of my favorite times at Spoonflower was when Deron and I first started working third shift and we had Mary as our temporary team leader. The three of us had a lot of fun at 7 or 8 a.m. After being up for so long, everything became funny -- really, really funny. I didn't realize how silly the whole thing was until we spent time with another co-worker after one of our shifts. The look on her face as the three of us spoke only in inside jokes for about thirty minutes straight was amazing, and a little bit scary. (Cake Boss!)

Whenever I’m not printing fabric at 3am, I usually try and do something with my car.

I’ve had my Mazda RX-8 Shinka for about 8 months now and this is its first Spring. I completely forgot about the NC pollen! This whole week my car was completely covered in pollen, and I won't sleep until I get a good coat of wax and a car cover between my car and that gross yellow stuff! It’s been nice to have a car I really care about enough to actually do preventative maintenance and servicing. Trying to find stuff I didn’t even know existed and change it or clean it has been really fun and exciting. I like knowing how things work, and trying to figure out a rotary engined semi-sports car has been a steep learning curve I hope to climb fully at some point. All in all, working on my car has been a mixed bag of success and failure. Deron helped me attempt to change the spark plugs, but 20 bloody knuckles, a broken ratchet swivel, and half a can of PB blaster later, I took it to a shop to change the last 2 plugs we couldn't muscle out. On the other hand, Jaysen helped me change my brake pads in about 20 minutes. It may have had something to do with the fact that Jaysen used to be a mechanic and did 90% of the work, but I still count that as a success.

I started DJing in Savannah, GA when I was at Savannah College of Art and Design. The first photo here is of a random house party I was DJing at.

My roommate brought all of his fancy equipment from Connecticut and with a lot of patience, he taught me what he could and eventually let me loose on a house party here and there. After a couple months, I was playing with him in clubs and loving it. I grew up loving music but wasn’t really interested in learning to play instruments. Learning how to DJ flipped some switch in my brain and it all started to make sense. Who needs instruments when you can play and transform all your favorite artists’ songs? Reading an entire crowd and giving them what they want, whether it be a deep cut house track or the newest club hip hop track, is by far the hardest part of DJing. Learning how to do that with 30 people is one thing, but 200 people in a club or 500 people at a house party is a whole new experience.

To this day, I still think a Savannah house party is one of the craziest things I've ever seen, the one night I will never forget. We managed to stuff 150 people into a two-bedroom, split-level duplex and at some point the air-conditioning just gave up. The entire place was a rainforest in about 15 minutes, and by the end of the night, people were sliding around on the floors. It was really gross and I broke my digital DJing controller, but I have never since seen that many people go so crazy for hours and hours without stopping. This is a photo from the epic sweat dance party.

When I came back to Durham, I came back having a skill I’d never had before in Durham, so I didn't know where to go as a DJ. I didn't know who to ask or if people even listened to the kind of music I played. Eventually I met someone from the Durty Durham Art Collective and talked his ear off about being a DJ. When I finally got to play, it was at the Pinhook at Halloween and it was pretty awesome, I mainly play a genre of music called Moombahton which is a crazy mash up of Dutch house music slowed down to and inspired by reggaeton. I thought no one in Durham would know how to respond to it but to my surprise, everyone loved it and I got invited to play again. Since then I’ve played a few more times at the Pinhook. I have another show scheduled for April 6th at the Garage, then another Pinhook show on May 12th. Being a DJ in Durham is worlds different than DJing in Savannah, but I love how low-stress and relaxed it is. I hope I can keep doing it. It's one of the few things I’ve really learned to stick with and it’s one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. [The curious can find some of Thomas' mixes here.]

When I was younger my parents made it a point to keep me exposed to as many different cultures and countries as they could. I actually got to live in France for six months while my mom got her masters in art history. It was definitely a crazy experience to be young and in school in a different country. Luckily I made some good friends and was able to speak some French by the end of the trip. When I got older I got to do some travelling on my own. I went to Scotland to do photography for my school. Scotland was great and such a beautiful place, and I would love to go back again without such a strict agenda.

My best travel experience was probably my high school class' senior trip. We went all over Europe and had the best tour guide. Somewhere between Copenhagen and Amsterdam I realized that Suzanne (our guide) was the key to the trip. We ended up listening to her during the day about the historical districts and attractions and then again at night on which bars to go to and what drinks to get. It was a wild experience to be in a thirty person group. My six classmates and I would sneak off with Suzanne to drink and meet locals while the rest of the group was in a museum. I would love to do something similar over a longer period of time. Having only 2 weeks to see most of Europe was just too short and I was a little too young to really appreciate everything I got to see.

March 26, 2012

This week guest author Emma Jeffery -- Fiskars design team member and author of the sewing and crafting blog Hello Beautiful -- brings us a lovely tutorial for designing fabric from children’s artwork and for making the custom iPad sleeve she created with her fabric.

A couple of decades ago when the Internet was still in its infancy, we would have found it hard to imagine that the new digital, technological age would be instrumental in securing the future of more traditional hand crafts skills. I’m sure I’m not alone in admitting that the inspiration I get from reading craft blogs or tutorials, and seeing many entrepreneurial handmade careers succeed online, has helped me hone my own skills enormously. In fact, it almost seems that even in order to be successful offline, an online presence is essential.

If I get stuck on a sewing project (zippers usually, in case you were interested) or want to learn a new crochet stitch or even find a free pattern, the first and often only place I turn, is to my computer. And if you’d told me a few years ago that one day I’d have the opportunity to design a few of my own fabrics and sew them into unique creations, I’d probably not have believed you.

First off, as much as I’d like to be, I am not a graphic designer. I even downloaded the trial version of Illustrator but we did not get on very well with each other. The cursor always appeared at random on different areas of the screen, everywhere it seemed, except where I clicked, and though I did watch some very helpful beginner’s tutorials, I quickly realized that anything I’d be able to create would pale into comparison against the beautiful and professional looking prints available in the Spoonflower marketplace designed by people with amazing talent.

However, what I may lack in skill, I make up for with good ideas and enthusiasm, so I decided that in keeping with my interest in technology versus tradition, I would turn to a somewhat older design method than my embarrassing computer-based effort. I also decided to involve my children in this exercise because, well, they are much better artists than me.

My take on a traditional block printing method required some well-washed Styrofoam food containers, a couple of wooden skewers, paint and paper. I also found a small craft roller brush more useful than an actual paintbrush.

I cut the Styrofoam into pieces and had my kids use the sharp end of the skewer to etch drawings into them (larger, basic designs are more effective than ones with too much detail). When they were done, we rolled over the designs with paint and stamped them onto plain paper.

When dry, I took photos of the designs, uploaded them to my computer and edited them in my basic photo editing software, flipped around the writing and added simple frames, as well as playing around with the colors.

When my printed fabric arrived, I knew immediately what I’d use it for. What better symbol for the meeting of two worlds - the digital and the handmade - than an iPad sleeve made with a block print fabric created by my children, digitally edited, and printed just for me by the mighty Spoonflower! And until they make iPads that bounce when dropped, some sort of robust padding is essential (at least in my house).

To make your own iPad sleeve like mine:

4. With right sides together and leaving ½” seam allowance, sew two of the 10” x 12” pieces together leaving one long end open plus a 6” opening in the opposite long end. This will be your lining (inside) piece.

5. Repeat step 4 with the other two 10” x 12” pieces and also with the two felt pieces but don’t leave the opening hole. Sew all the way around 3 sides, leaving one long side open. Clip all corners and trim seam allowance to reduce bulk.

6. With right sides together, sew the two tab pieces together, leaving one long end open. Turn right way out and press. Top stitch around the 3 sewn edges of the tab.

About Our Guest Blogger

I'm an obsessive sewer, often leaping into projects with more enthusiasm than talent, more bravado than skill and more good luck than anything else. This technique has worked well for me so far and more often than not, I make things I love, even if they're not absolutely perfect. And though I'm no expert, I have a passion for fabric, color and design. I know what I like and what I like makes me smile.

March 22, 2012

Our contest this week is an unusual one for a couple of reasons. First, we're inviting you to vote for a collection of juried fabric designs, which is a change from our generally inclusive approach to contests. The 45 designs up for voting were selected as finalists by judges from the Textile Center in Minneapolis from a pool of 236 entries. All of the fabrics were inspired by one or more of six photos taken in and around the Prospect Park neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN, where a new light rail line is being constructed through the center of the neighborhood. The Textile Center plans to exhibit the top ten fabrics in its gallery to celebrate the art that can be found in everyday surroundings and the daily transition of the neighborhood landscape during this large construction project. One winner, selected by curators of the gallery, will receive a free, copy of Photoshop, and all of the top ten will receive $50 in Spoondollar credit!

Apart from giving birth to a formidable new tongue twister (see above), our Staff Challenge contest has created a slew of cool new decorations for our already-colorful office. The winners? None other than Darci and Tim, who concocted a madly ambitious project that required placing over 100 individual LED lights onto a stunning world map printed on linen-cotton canvas and stretched onto a frame.

March 21, 2012

Thank you all for the overwhelming response to last week's giveaway of three fat quarter bundles of Laurie Wisbrun's Jack & Jenny fabrics printed by Robert Kaufman, and three copies of Laurie's new book, Mastering the Art of Fabric Printing and Design. It's pretty clear that Laurie has a lot of fans out there! The winners were Camilla Larsson, An Cornelissen, and Melina Buslaiman. Congratulations to all three of you, and I hope both Laurie's fabrics and her design expertise will come in handy!

This week, we're giving away a veritable library of pattern and design eye candy for one lucky winner to drool over. A copy each of Print & Pattern 1 and Print & Pattern 2 by Bowie Style, along with the brand-new Patterns by Drusilla Cole (which won't be officialy released until next month) could be yours if you comment here or on the corresponding Facebook post before next Tuesday, 3/27 at 7 pm EST. As always, please include your Spoonflower name so that we can find you easily. We'll announce the winner on Wednesday, 3/28. Good luck, all! This giveaway is now closed and we'll be announcing a winner shortly!

March 20, 2012

As we return to normal after last week's Spoonflower Staff Challenge madness, I'm happy to introduce you to Jennifer Finan, help desk maven. Jennifer also happens to have been my hanky-making partner in the challenge, so I enjoyed learning a little more about her pre-Spoonflower life in her own words. I hope you do, too!

I grew up in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Since leaving, I've developed an affection for my hometown but growing up outside of the city ingrained in me a desire to always want to leave and go to the city. Philadelphia offered art, music, humor, adventure, a sense of urgency and sometimes danger, whereas my town provided stability and safety. (You can probably guess which option seemed more appealing to a teenager!) Now I enjoy going back to visit, and I think having that duality of “town mouse and country mouse” as a kid was a really great balance for me.

My first job (besides babysitting) was teaching a swimming class to five-year olds at our high school while I was in the ninth grade. That summer, my best friend and I bleached and streaked hot pink through our hair. After a few pool sessions, my blonde-pink hair began to tinge green from the heavily-chlorinated high school pool. The kids loved it, though. I probably looked like a cartoon character.

When I was 20, the prospect of working all summer in a restaurant or something like that wasn’t really appealing to me. I ended up stumbling upon a website looking for au pairs (nannies) and immediately signed up. I was eventually picked by a family who lived right outside of London. They sent me a plane ticket and, sight unseen, I arrived as their American nanny. In England, I developed a true appreciation for spicy curries, traveling alone, and English beer.

Prior to the winter of 2011 when I was hired at Spoonflower, I had worked mostly as an editor and writer for newspapers and several news-y blogs in North Carolina. I ended up in journalism almost on a complete lark. My real love was creating and editing video, which I had just gotten a degree in from Temple University in Philadelphia. I thought I would move to New York City and become a video editor. I even got a couple of offers to stay on with the various internships I had while in college. But the truth was that I was really restless after living in the Philly area pretty much my entire life. So when I found the opportunity to move to Appalachia to work for a New York Times regional newspaper, I went for it. It was just random enough to feel like an adventure.

I began as a copy editor, and quickly moved onto reporting and video. Short-form documentary video was just burgeoning back in 2008 as newspapers struggled to stay solvent with younger audiences. I was happy to be a part of it with a company like the Times. (You can view some of Jennifer's videos here.)

I’ve had the most fun working on docu-style videos, profiling individuals and bands. One of my favorite stories and videos I did was on rescued wolf dogs. When I pulled up to interview a wolf farm owner, after somewhat miraculously navigating up a remote, unpaved road in my Nissan Altima, I was met by the howls of nearly seventy enormous wolf dogs. It was awesome...and kind of terrifying. I really developed a soft spot for wolf dogs after doing that story, though, and it even motivated me to adopt a rescue dog of my own.

That's just the tip of my curriculum vitae iceberg. In general, I like to know how things work and I like to have fun. Working in customer service at Spoonflower is definitely my favorite job. It’s fulfilling and refreshing to provide an earnest service that allows me to learn something new every day. My favorite moments on the Spoonflower help desk, besides getting positive messages, are solving issues that have been causing a headache for the customer. It's like a breakthrough moment in therapy and you go, "O-oooh! I get it!" The most frustrating moments include everything that happens prior to that realization. (Joke!)

Spoonflower is filled with cool, charitable people who are all talented in their own ways. It's totally a compliment to be grouped along with them. Working here, I now basically want to cover everything in fabric. One of my favorite Spoonflower designers is Domesticate and I also adore anything by Anda. I basically love any designer that uses a limited color palette with bold graphics or illustrations. I also love anything printed on my favorite fabrics, our linen/cotton canvas and organic cotton sateen. Those fabrics make anything look great to me.

As for my own creative pursuits and free time, I'm currently in the throes of March Madness and am rooting for the UNC Tarheels to take all. Despite that, though, I'm taking a break this weekend to visit some good friends in Washington, D.C. My friend Jessie Hemmons is putting together an installation at Corcoran College of Art + Design of her awesome knit bombery. I'll probably find a way to squeeze in some NCAA action, though!

I have a growing list of future projects on the horizon, including setting up a homebrew kit because I'm a huge craft beer nerd. I've been lucky to live in NC which in my opinion has the best beer culture in the country, though Philly and Portland, OR are pretty exciting places for beer, too. Besides that, I'm planning on putting together some animated tutorials for Spoonflower users, and I'll be sewing some actual summer clothes this season as well.

I'm really excited for the future. There are lots of places new to me that I want to explore, like the Falkland Islands (almost purely for the penguins), and also places I know I will always revisit, like Asheville, NC and Philadelphia. It's good to have friends sprawled out all over the place with open couches.

March 15, 2012

Llittle boys all over can now celebrate a world with the potential to produce many more robot quilts than were possible just a week ago. We are very excited to show you the top ten entries from our robot cheater quilt competition, the winner of which is Eloisa D., of Natitys Design, a "fabric-o-holic" from Florida whose design won the most votes out of a group of fabulous entries.

Our Staff Challenge turned into nothing short of a DIY-war, with the Spoonflower office scattered with crazily ambitious, half-finished projects for weeks, and team members bleary-eyed from working on them until the wee hours. So it's a huge relief to have reached the final stage, in which we give all of the regular Spoonflower contest designers a break so that you all have a chance to vote for our work for a change. We hope voting is almost as fun as making these projects has been!

March 14, 2012

This is the last in a series of posts describing the projects that are part of our 2012 Spoonflower Staff Challenge. Voting begins tomorrow!

Tim and I (Darci) dove into this project like crazy people. We definitely bit off more than we could chew, so it's fitting that for our Spoonflower Staff Challenge we chose to make...the entire world according to Spoonflower. Our completed project is a fabric world map stretched over a frame with LEDs marking major world cities.

A good soundtrack for this blog post would be all the hard rock that spurred us during many late nights as we feverishly toiled away. The soundtrack would be peppered with bursts of maniacal laughter erupting every time we looked up from our uber-meticulous task. More than once we questioned our sanity for embarking on such an ambitious project but now, gazing at our framed world map complete with sparkling LEDs marking some of the world's major cities, we think it was worth it. If you come visit us here at Spoonflower headquarters, we hope you'll agree.

The Fabric Design: Tim created the simple and elegant textures for the world map. He filled the land portions with a tonal design that conjures land plots, and made the water pattern by scanning a piece of construction paper layered with a close-up of watercolor on paper. We added in a bit of extra fun (read: work) with some embroidery patterns on the fabric made from some of my sketched designs.

The Brains: Now for the guts of the project--wiring LEDs to the major world cities. I will give this over to Tim since, while I was a more than willing assistant to the main portion of the project, he was definitely the electronic wizard here.

Tim: The foundation for the electronic portion of the project used an open source, do-it-yourself friendly, programmable controller called an Arduino. It allows you to plug into a computer and write custom code directly to the board.

In our original vision, we wanted the LEDs on the map to link to the Spoonflower website so that when someone places an order, an LED closest to their geographical location lights up on the map. There are over 100 lights on the map, and they're each individually wired into the back of the Arduino unit which in turn is plugged via a USB cable into a computer. If you look at the back of the map, you can see how much wire this took--over 150 feet, I believe. Although it was a time consuming process, wiring the map in this way allowed for each light to be individually addressed for our purposes.

Darci: I've never wired anything, so having the chance to assist Tim in the process was actually fun and informative for me. After many hours of wire stripping, cutting, LED poking (only sometimes poking ourselves), and even more soldering of all the bits from LED to connecting wiring to the Arduino unit, the map was complete. Almost. There was light, though! For now, the lights blink in a randomized order but in Phase II of this project, to be completed later, we will code the unit to light up the city nearest to a Spoonflower order.

To ice the electronic fabric cake, I then embroidered our world map with beauty marks in contrasting thread.

Click on the photo above for a short video of the lighted map.

Thanks for reading and don't worry--no Tims or Darcis were harmed in the making of this lighted fabric world map. We have a new art piece that brightens up the space at Spoonflower HQ where we print, cut, and ship your fabric all over the globe.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing licensed fabric designer, Laurie Wisbrun. Laurie has been with Spoonflower since practically our very beginning, and we've been thrilled bystanders as she has evolved from life on the "corporate hamster wheel" to success as a popular fabric designer. In the two years since she released her first Tufted Tweets collection with Robert Kaufman, Laurie's brightly colored novelty fabrics have been snapped up by quilters and crafters. Laurie has also just put out her first book, Mastering the Art of Fabric Printing and Design, in which she shares the expertise she herself gained from having starting from scratch designing and printing fabrics.

So, what is your design background, and how did you get started designing fabrics? I worked in marketing and advertising for close to 20 years but during that time, design wasn’t part of my professional life at all (except for presenting other people’s designs to my clients). Then about three years ago, while working at a big Manhattan ad agency, I felt absolutely ready for a major change and wanted to do something that I could be really passionate about. I had no idea what that might be, so I just started experimenting and trying out a bunch of different things.

I’ve always had a penchant for handmade things and artisan goods, so I gave cheese-making a go. For a few cheese-filled weeks I seriously considered moving to Vermont to be an artisan cheese maker, but it turns out I have no cheese-making talent at all. It’s still my all-time favorite food, though!

During my creative exploration I happened upon Spoonflower and soon afterward, I took a night class at FIT (the Fashion Institute of Technology) on marketing your own line. Part of my refuge from a high-stress work life has always been sewing and quilting, and I’ve always had a mild obsession with patterns. After falling in love with Spoonflower and designing my first pattern for fabric (the Birdies and Chairs print from my Tufted Tweets collection), I felt like I had finally found my calling. A few months later I decided to make the leap and focus on building my own business based on my designs. So I quit my job and moved back to Austin, which is where I'd gone to college. It was a perfect move at the perfect time. The creative community here is tremendous and I have such a wonderful network and so much support here.

Once I decided that textile and surface design was what I wanted to do, I set my sights on getting a licensing deal with a major fabric manufacturer. I was beyond thrilled to sign with Kaufman and they continue to be supremely wonderful to work with. And without Spoonflower, I never would have discovered this new path. This interview is such a full circle moment for me, and I’m so thankful to everyone who has provided so much support and encouragement along the way! In my wildest dreams I never could have envisioned how everything was going to grow and take shape and how much fun I would be having.

What prompted you to write a book about fabric design and printing?

I was featured on Print and Pattern some time ago and through that exposure, my publisher discovered my blog. After reading my work for a bit and exploring my design sensibilities, she reached out to me about the possibility of writing a book on fabric design and printing. Having just spent the last few years learning about design and printing through my own trial and error, I was so excited about the prospect of writing the book I'd really wanted as my own reference. I was able to use so many of the notes I had compiled for myself while I was learning, and I expanded on them to create a resource that I’m really excited about.

I was surprised to find such an extensive section on printing by hand and screenprinting in your book. I didn’t know you did this sort of designing and printing, too! How do these printing methods compare for you to the process of designing and printing fabrics digitally and via mass production methods?

Growing up in a creative family, it seems like we were always making something. So although I absolutely adore designing digitally, I also love working with something where I’ve got glue on my hands, paint under my nails, or dye mixed up in a bath. Usually that means ending up with a really special selection of fabric at the end of a project, making it all the better!

I love the somewhat unpredictable nature of printing by hand and the natural variances that come from those techniques. I have a pretty wide selection of hand carved stamps and screens that I’ve made or collected over the years, and it’s always fun to get to use them.

Although I’ve dabbled in a bunch of different types of printing and embellishing, I really wanted to make sure to include expert advice from people who bring a modern and unique sensibility to more traditional printing approaches. I was so fortunate to be able to work with some really talented designers, so the book includes tutorials from Malka Dubrawsky (on dyeing), Jesse Breytenbach (on stamping) and Ink and Spindle (on screenprinting).

Do you always have an end use in mind when designing fabrics?

I don’t always have an end use in mind when I’m designing fabric. I do, however, always have an end user in mind. I spend a lot of time chatting with people through my blog, through Flickr, and via email, and I try to stay in touch with what I think would resonate with that group of people.

When I sit down to sketch or design something, my creative juices can get flowing in some pretty random directions some days, and I’m sometimes surprised at what pops out of my head. But I tend to just trust the process, follow along, and see what I end up with. Once I finish a design, I step away from the finished piece for a bit and then circle back to see if I think it will speak to people in the way that I intended it to. (Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t!)

Where do you find inspiration for your fabric designs?

Inspiration can really come from anywhere for me. I love spending time in museums and reading books and magazines. I’m always jotting notes or ideas down; you never know where inspiration might strike.

I recently finished some llama designs which were inspired by my neighborhood here in Austin. I live in an area that used to be rural, which means there are some lots in my neighborhood that used to be ranch land and are grandfathered into the zoning restrictions. There's a horse that I see nearly every day across the street from my grocery store, and there's a plot of land nearby that has two llamas on it. You should have heard me the first time I spied those llamas! All alone in the car, I screamed, "LOOK! Llamas!"

And now, every single time I drive down that street, I gleefully shout, 'LOOK! Llamas!" Don't care if I'm alone or with company, I say hello to the llamas. They are ridiculously cute and make me happy every time I see them. So I was of course compelled to whip up a few patterns inspired by my new llama friends. Then the ‘look’ turned into glasses, which then led to a little flapdoodle hat…. For me, it’s all about letting my creativity run amok and seeing what comes out.

It seems like you often debut new fabric designs in your Etsy shop before they get licensed by Robert Kaufman where they sometimes undergo color and scale changes. I’d love to hear more about the evolution of your designs from digital printing to large-scale printing.

Working with Robert Kaufman is such a fun and collaborative experience and I’ve learned so much from working with them. Many of my designs start out in my Etsy shop and then they end up being licensed and mass produced. But there are also designs which go straight to the team at Robert Kaufman and bypass my store all together. It just depends on the design and the timing.

I worked with one of the stylists at RK to outline the highlights below of the process of working together. Hopefully, this will provide some insight into how a design can evolve. I’m fairly prolific with my designs and try to send new work for RK to review as frequently as possible. If a collection is selected to be licensed, we start the process of adjusting scale and color and making any tweaks to composition that might be needed.

With regard to pattern scale, a variety of scales are needed for a collection to work as a quilt group. Generally, one focal design is selected along with some mid-sized and small-scale patterns. Since most of my collections are more novelty-based, though, scale is somewhat more relaxed than a more traditional collection and there’s more flexibility with the scale range. To test scale, the designs are printed out at various repeats. For instance, if it was designed to be close to a 6-inch repeat, it’s looked at as an 8-inch or 12-inch repeat (and vice versa). We use 24-inch repeats and repeats that are fractions of 24 inches. The most often used are probably 6-, 8-,and 12-inches, but repeats can be as small as 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-, or 4.8-inches. Once everything is printed out, the pieces are reviewed together as a collection to see what fits together best.

As for color, Robert Kaufman spends a great deal of time analyzing sales of past collections of similar groups, and watching color trends in fashion, home decor, stationery and scrapbooking. So although I submit color recommendations based on my own preferences and the trends I’m personally watching, the process of defining colors is quite collaborative, and I really enjoy it. The design and marketing teams at RK will tweak colors and will also sometimes take the colors in a brand-new direction. Being new to design and to textiles, I really love the input and welcome any enhancements that are offered.

Once the designs are finalized, the design team takes over and works through preparing the art for flat bed printing. Flat bed printing is very similar to the screenprinting process where one screen is “cut” or “engraved” for each color. Each color is then applied through the screens and stacked to create the design. If we're printing in Korea, we can have up to 18 screens but if we're printing in Japan, we can only have 15. This makes very shaded designs more difficult than flat colored ones. Rotary printing is still used, but is less popular due to the very small number of screens that can be used. Other design elements may also have to be altered for printability. For example, very fine lines or details may have to be enlarged so that they won't end up looking like blobs when they're printed. We also have to consider placement of colors. Complementary colors such as red and green can't touch each other or they'll create a not-so-pretty brown color on their edges.

Can you give us any hints about new projects or fabric lines you might have in the works?

In terms of fabric, 2012 is going to be chock full of new collections. Modern Whimsy and Jack and Jenny (the donkeys in rainboots) are shipping now, and I’m having so much fun seeing people’s creations start to pop up in my Flickr group and on Pinterest.

Then in April, there’s a small collection called Next Stop London which I recently just posted a sneak peak of on my blog. Brrr! (the little polar bears) starts shipping in June, and Perfectly Perched (the follow up to Tufted Tweets) will start shipping in July. Then I'll be coming out with three more collections before the end of the year!

I’m also still working on limited release fabrics that I print with Spoonflower. I’m tinkering around now with some new pillow panels that I hope to roll out within the next month and have a new swan themed collection that should be ready for my Etsy store sometime this spring. In the next few months, I also have plans to roll out some new types of products in my store, like patterned packing tape and more journals. I’m working feverishly on some other new products as well and hope I can launch them before summer.

I’ve licensed a handful of my designs for use on stationery and gifts so those will roll out in 2013, and I’m now working on my second book about fabric embellishing. It’s being published by Interweave and should ship before the end of 2012 or early in 2013. I’m definitely juggling a bunch of balls and projects but I'm loving every minute!

Thanks, Laurie! And now for the giveaways! If you'd like to win a fat quarter bundle of ten prints from Laurie's Jack and Jenny collection (as pictured) AND a copy of Mastering the Art of Fabric Printing and Design, just comment on this blog post or on the corresponding Facebook post. I'm delighted to say that due to the the generosity of the folks at both Robert Kaufman and Chronicle Books, we'll be able to choose three winners this week. Don't forget to include your Spoonflower screen name in your comment so that we can track you down. Entries close next Tuesday, 3/20 at 7 pm EST. Good luck, everyone! This giveaway is now closed and we'll be announcing a winner shortly.

This is the fourteenth in a series of fifteen posts describing the projects that are part of our 2012 Spoonflower Staff Challenge. Voting begins tomorrow!

Turner’s Tattooed Tee

It’s hard to live up to what happened last year. Seeing as how the strategy was successful then, Turner and I (Danielle) decided stick to what we know we are good at and what we love. For Turner, it was his wicked modeling and idea-generation, and for me, hand-drawn images.

We opted to keep our project simple and shareable! Turner is modeling our raglan-style tee with thumb holes printed on Spoonflower's organic cotton interlock knit. The shirt is an approximate men’s size medium, and can fit up to a 38-inch chest. We have plans in the near future to offer more sizes down to the wee-est of folk. The tattoo pattern wraps the body in a seamless set of great tattoos.

While Turner and I are both tattoo-less, we have always secretly coveted some awesome skin art. I have a serious love for sailor style tattoos, and Turner had some great ideas for what he’d like to see and where they should go. The squid across the back? All Turner’s idea.

All the artwork, just like a real tattoo, is drawn by hand with love and care. Just in case you were wondering, you can spot other tattoo ideas from Turner as well. Turner is a music major at one of the local universities and his music themed tattoos are integrated throughout. We’ll have sewing instructions added to our tee soon, followed by some additional sizes.

This is the thirteenth in a series of posts describing the projects that are part of our 2012 Spoonflower Staff Challenge. Voting begins tomorrow!

Thomas and Caitlin’s team was one of the cursed third shift/first shift pairings. This made it a little challenging for them to plan their project, but they were able to carve out time to meet up when their brains were both working. Sort of. (Coffee helped.) After several wired brainstorm sessions, they decided to create stretched fabric canvases that would act as frames for photos. Thomas used his rusty Photoshop skills to manipulate some awesome, textured photos that he and Caitlin had taken into neon texture wonderlands. After some color tweaking with the handy dandy Spoonflower color guide, the designs were printed onto linen/cotton canvas and were ready to be stretched and stitched by Caitlin!

Caitlin stretched the fabrics over some 8-inch x10-inch stretcher bars purchased at a local craft store using a staple gun and a bit of elbow grease.

Lining everything up at this juncture is crucial so that the background fabric doesn’t get distorted, bunched up, or gets stapled too loosely onto the frames. (Also, avoid stapling yourself!)

After stretching the background fabrics onto the frames, Thomas and Caitlin met up again with their selected photos to decide how to attach them to the background fabrics. Thomas put those rusty Photoshop skills to use once again to tweak the photos a bit before printing them onto linen/cotton canvas. Caitlin, with her mighty embroidery prowess, suggested attaching the photos with different embroidery stitches in the photo margins using bright, neon floss.

The idea was finalized and after some finger-pricking fun, the final product was finished!

March 13, 2012

This is the twelfth in a series of posts describing the projects that are part of our 2012 Spoonflower Staff Challenge. Voting begins on Thursday, March 15, 2012.

Gart: Stephen had mentioned the idea of a project-based staff contest working in teams. Hmmm, I thought, how do I convince my teamie that this needs to be all about recumbent bicycles? Anyone who remembers last year’s staff contest may recall the ‘velveteen bike’ entry. Well, as it turned out, that wasn’t a problem!

Allie: When it was announced that I would be working with Gart I knew we both shared a common interest in biking and thought something in relation to that would make an awesome project! In our first meeting Gart and I discussed the possibility of making a wind sock for his recumbent bicycle and I must admit, initially I was a bit skeptical of how we would make this work but thought it would be a fun challenge to tackle.

Gart: So when I learned that I was teamed with Allie, and she talked about doing something relating to bicycles, I was psyched. Not only is Allie a genuinely artistic person, but she is also completely un-intimidatable, if that’s a word. No crazy idea too big.

I started thinking about ennobling the honorable bones of my antique recumbent bike with a fabric streamline shell. This had loads of nerd appeal for me. Streamlining was a cultural movement paralleling art deco in the 30’s, with no less than one of the greatest design nerds of all time as its wizard-king: Buckminster Fuller. And of course Streamliners are a genuine custom engineering mandate on the Bonneville Salt Flats if you want to set a speed record. Finally, Streamliners have become a fixture in setting human powered vehicle speed records. Allie was game to try this, so we had a project.

When Allie asked me about the design, I knew right away what I thought would be cool. I grew up in the NorthWest corner of Puerto Rico in the late 70s and early 80s. There was nothing cooler than surfing, no cool surfer was without a custom van, and these vans were a canvas for local airbrush artists that seemed to focus on nothing but waves and sunsets. And of course the gnarliest wave in myth or reality is the Great Wave off Kanagawa.

Allie: The idea for our fabric came from Gart. He wanted something wave related and left color and design up to me. He mentioned the iconic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa so I used that as inspiration and was happy to hear he liked what I came up with.

I sketched out a few waves and used colored pencils to fill in some color. The background of the photo came from a picture I took while in Denham, Western Australia. During Spring Break of the semester I spend in Perth, WA we drove North from Perth about 800 miles and Denham was one of our stops. I have never seen sunsets quite like those and thought it would be perfect for the background of this fabric, and the end result did not disappoint.

Construction: While it probably comes as no surprise, I had no experience sewing anything to be mounted onto a bicycle, and honestly don’t have much other sewing experience so this was quite the challenge for me. Luckily it was basically all straight lines so it was easier than I had anticipated but working with six yards of cotton silk was no walk in the park. When it came to actually attaching the fabric to the bike, I left that up to Gart.

Gart: Well Allie did a fantastic job. I can’t imagine a surfer that would not have been proud to have her design on their van.

The next step was to design the rigging. I decided to use velcro to attach the fabric to the front, and to use the rack on the back of the bike to support a PVC pipe as the attachment point for the back. We mocked this up, and it became clear that the fabric would foul in the rear tire, the chain, and the pedals without an internal frame, so we set about designing that.

I knew I wanted a teardrop shape with a relatively long tail. I thought the least we could get away with was an upper and lower batten holding the shape. With materials and design questions on the brain, I went to the hardware store to think. Several hours and a couple trips later, I settled on using a combination of PVC and Pex piping from the plumbing aisle. These had the benefit of being light weight, cheap, with lots of sizes and connecting options. It was kind of like assembling legos, except you get to saw up all the bits to make them fit your size.

The frame started with a 45 degree joint at the nose with two ¾ inch pex pipes going out about 18 inches, attached to two 6 foot lengths of of ½ inche pex flowing back to the tail of the tear drop.

Allie: I created pockets on the inside of the fabric to insert the ribs. This helped it all stay together and hold its shape. After a few adjustments, cuts, and new seams here and there we started to see this thing really coming together!

Gart: once the pockets for the ribs were in place, we needed to work out the dimensions for each of the ribs. We did this by successive approximation, which means we sawed up a LOT of different versions.

At first it looked like a bike powered shower stall, but that didn’t last too long. As we tweaked it started to take shape.

Allie: The final changes were pretty minor. We had to move the whole thing up a bit in the front to keep the frame out of the pedals, and after a few changes here and there we had sucessfully made a usable streamliner!

This is the eleventh in a series of posts describing the projects that are part of our 2012 Spoonflower Staff Challenge. Voting begins on Thursday, March 15, 2012.

When the Spoonflower Staff Challenge was announced Anna and I (Jesse) were paired together to form Team Big Dreams. We both immediately wanted to create something fun for Anna’s two sons, ages four and eight. After lots of brainstorming and ideas (teepees, forts, castles, etc.) we were still undecided on what our final project should be. That’s when we decided to go straight to the source. Nicholas and Evan gave us their own list of ideas, and that’s when the rocket ship playhouse concept took flight.

The next stage involved designing the fabric for the rocket. Anna and I both agreed that we wanted the print to be simple but also somewhat realistic. I used basic tools in Photoshop to create the design. The stars were made with the custom shape tool, while the rocket’s body used a few other standard shapes. The gradient tool also had a heavier than usual workout, as I used it to create a metallic looking texture.

We chose to print the designs on linen-cotton canvas. The linen-cotton prints very nicely while remaining relatively lightweight and durable. The stars were printed in half-drop repeat on two yards of linen-cotton. The blue design is sized to fit on two yards of linen-cotton, and we used two pieces of this design. That means the finished project ended up being over six feet tall!

After a few rounds of test swatches, we finally settled on the correct color of red to use. Yes, even Spoonflower employees revise their colors to avoid shifty reds!

Anna spent several late nights sewing everything together. She joined the two body pieces, hemmed them, and left a flap on one of the seams for easy access inside the ship. The windows were cut out to provide a couple portholes for the cosmonauts to peer from. Anna also created sleeves on the inside for flexible tubing to be inserted, so that the structure would hold its shape.

The stars were turned into a cone for the top of the rocket, which is meant to hang from a hook in the ceiling. We also used the star fabric to create tail fins on the bottom of the rocket. The fins were made from cardboard, which Anna covered in fabric and hand stitched.

Overall, our goal was to create a simple, fun design that would be portable and easy to store. Most importantly we were able to make Nicholas and Evan’s dream a reality!

This is the tenth in a series of posts describing the projects that are part of our 2012 Spoonflower Staff Challenge. Voting begins on Thursday, March 15, 2012.

Chad’s Intro: This year’s staff contest has to be the most ambitious month-long project I’ve undertaken since graduating from college. A wide open format for this project had Melodie and I (Chad) thinking of all sorts of fun things to do. Ranging from the small (bow-ties), to the abstract (I’ve always wanted to make a fabric tree), to the functional (the couch we finally decided on), we found it really hard to decide on the best project to tackle. When we finally sat down to do some sketches of the eventual end products, we realized that the couch was just crazily ambitious enough to possibly win the contest. Plus we had the universe on our side - on the last night we were sewing the cushions and had Chinese takeout on our break, I got this fortune:

One of the major reasons we decided to do the couch was that I’m driven to find ways to reuse the things we tend to throw away here at Spoonflower. Besides using some of our ink waste to create prints on t-shirts, I’ve been speculating about a way to reuse the large number of cardboard tubes that we recycle each day. Making a couch out of them seemed really interesting and possibly dangerous. Who would think that cardboard could really hold up the weight of two grown adults?

So we had our general idea, but we had to think of what kind of fabric design we wanted to use.

Melodie on fabric design: Both Chad and I are avid music lovers, so it was no surprise that we chose a project that centered around it. I really love the concept of visually representing something that you would normally only be able to enjoy aurally. I decided to create a sound wave design that would be able to span the length of our couch, creating visual movement.

I used a few photos for reference and with the help of one of our more Illustrator savvy coworkers, I drew the design using the pen tool. It was actually a lot easier than I expected it to be, and I definitely plan on tinkering with more fabric designs in the future.

Chad on fabric design: After Melodie created the design, we both sat down and tried to color match against the Spoonflower color map. Since we’re both printers, we understand that though we had a design we both loved, the colors we loved might not turn out exactly as we wanted. Using the color map and Photoshop, we tweaked the colors of the design until we got the shades of blue, gray and white that we found ideal. In the end, I’m really glad we took the extra time to pinpoint those colors as it pulled the entire design together.

At this point I have to mention that Melodie and I work two completely different shifts. The time we see each other at Spoonflower is usually centered around the bi-monthly meeting where we stuff our faces and discuss the happenings of the Spoonflower community. When the contest and partners were announced at one of these meetings we quickly pulled together our idea but afterwards, we tended to work in parallel until it became crunch time. My main job was to put together the cardboard couch, whereas Melodie was largely responsible for the design, printing and sewing the couch cushions together.

Chad on making the couch: Let me preface this with one thing: I’d never built a couch before. My uncle made the now-famous Spoonflower color chip chair and has his own reupholstering business called Select Furniture in High Point, NC, and my father manufactures and sells large runs of fabric out of New Jersey. Both were channeled in the creation of this couch. Though I have no experience in furniture, I like to think that it’s in my blood, both from them and just from being a North Carolina native.

That being said, I did a fair amount of research on how I wanted to put this couch together. I started out by thinking of this basically as a piece of bamboo furniture, tough tubes of material pieced together with steel rods. With a kind of patio furniture feel, I felt like that was a pretty cool idea. I’d already been thinking about doing a project like this for some time and with the help of Melodie and some other friends, I really started to piece it together around the time that this project got announced. That was pretty good timing.

After collecting approximately forty cardboard tubes, I began to assemble the couch. At first, using tape to hold the pieces together, I created the legs and crossbeams to assemble the general frame. I added the beams that run along the bottom of the couch and figured out how I wanted the back of the couch to look. After feeling my way through how big the couch should be, I purchased some threaded rods to run through the support beams.

I’ll say right now that having the right tools for the job was critical for this project. Unfortunately I didn’t really have the right tools. Using a skill saw and a hack saw, I cut each cardboard tube to size as well as every steel rod. If I make another couch, it’s definitely going to be after I buy some new tools. I’m pretty sure I destroyed every hacksaw blade I had.

I pre-drilled all the holes for the steel rods to run through the tubes and once I got the basic frame together, it really started to look like it might work out. At this point I was still unsure if the tubes themselves would hold the weight of people sitting on it. The added support of the steel rods helped hold the couch together.

When the frame was done I added a layer of cut down tubes to the middle of the couch, then added another layer of support beams on top to create a place for the cushions to rest. This allows the cushion to be supported evenly across the entire couch and gave it a nice secure fit. I did the same thing for the back of the couch, using smaller carriage bolts to attach the beams to the back of the couch. Eventually I realized that I needed a middle leg to prevent the couch from sagging. I added these and the arms in a similar fashion, cutting larger tubes with holes in the middle to slide them along the supports and fixing them with carriage bolts. I did all of this over the course of about a week and a half. When I finally got the whole thing assembled, I took the whole couch apart, threw it in the back of my car and drove it up to Spoonflower to fit the cushions.

Chad on Sewing and Creating the Cushions: Like I mentioned earlier, my uncle has an upholstery business so I was fortunate to have access to his pillow and cushion maker. This definitely helped the project along, but we still had to create the cushion covers from our design.

Melodie on Sewing It All Up: This project was one of the largest I have ever tackled. Accuracy was of paramount importance, both in pattern placement and overall fit. Because of the large scale of the design, proper centering was a must. Additionally, accurate measurements were very important, as I wanted a crisp, clean look. To ensure accuracy, I placed the fabric over the cushion, and marked the corners of each side. Then, I measured each side of the cushion, adding an inch for seam allowance, and cut the fabric.

After all of the pieces were measured and cut, I lined up the right sides together, taking care to ensure that each pattern piece lined up with the design. I pinned them together, and then sewed each piece with a ½ inch seam. I double stitched each seam to prevent unravelling, but a serger would have been helpful on this step.

After all of the patterned pieces were sewn together, I took a plain white piece of linen the same size as the front of the cushion, and sewed it to the rest of the cushion cover on three sides. Then I put the cushion into the cover. With such a close fit, it took a bit of wriggling to get it on. Then, I whip-stitched the remaining side onto the cushion backs. We also plan to add some additional throw pillows and to install speakers into the couch arms in the near future.

Chad’s Closing: Well, that basically takes us to the end of the couch. I think the entire project turned out a lot better than either of us anticipated. Hopefully you’ll all think the same thing, and please, please vote as such. I know it’s not a unicorn but I think it’s just as magical, and a lot more practical

March 12, 2012

This is the ninth in a series of posts describing the projects that are part of our 2012 Spoonflower Staff Challenge. Voting begins on Thursday, March 15, 2012.

When Jennifer and I (Kim) were paired up for this staff challenge, we were in almost immediate agreement that our project would be to decoupage some large-scale fabric motifs onto a vintage, fixer-upper piece of furniture. Our main goal was to end up with something that one of us would actually use but in all honesty, we were pretty pleased to have an excuse to indulge our shared obsession with thrift shop and vintage store shopping. We briefly toyed with the idea of a stealth redesign raid involving a giant squid, a scuba diver, and Stephen’s desk, but Jennifer worried this might annoy Stephen. Plus, we wouldn’t have that excellent reason to make the rounds of all the secondhand stores in our area. Stephen’s desk was left in all its pristine, 1980’s veneer glory then, and we began scouring our local thrift and re-use shops, keeping our eyes peeled for curbside scores, and trawling Craigslist for furniture fodder to work some magic on. Despite being seasoned thrifters, though, we didn’t find a darn thing that we thought would work.

I was on my eighth trip or so, this time to an unheated junque shop in Carrboro, NC on a cold, rainy day. There were some nicer pieces of furniture that would have worked but were out of our price range. Too bad. There was also a huge, homemade, folding screen that someone had assembled out of solid wood panels, metal caster wheels, and 1960’s era travel posters.

It would be incredibly cool it it were refinished and had some large flowers or some such shellacked onto it, but it was massively heavy, much too big for my old Honda, and I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to destroy those posters. Sigh. I left the shop chilled, discouraged and with a runny nose.

Pausing in the parking lot, I pulled out a handkerchief to wipe my nose and consider our options, and then it hit me. Hankies! I emailed Jennifer with the idea right away, and she was down with it. Jennifer remembered as a child that a dear aunt always carried pretty, embroidered hankies, and was excited about the prospect of designing a new collection that could riff on old designs.

Jennifer describes her reaction to the idea this way: From an early age, I've always liked older items. Vintage, thrift, and consignment are the words I associate with most of my purchases. So when Kim proposed something as quaint as designing handkerchiefs for the contest, my interest was instantly piqued. Then when Kim brought in some of her own collection of vintage handkerchiefs for inspiration, I was hooked – each one was so delicate and unique.

We chatted briefly about our respective skills and decided that I would design the hankies and Kim would cut and hem them. The very first thing I did was to scan the vintage handkerchiefs so that I had a digital copy of each to reference later while creating our designs. (I feared taking the actual hankies to my house due to the overwhelming appetite for destruction that one of my dogs has.)

As I was scanning, I began to take notice of elements I wanted to incorporate into our versions: floral, graphic, plaid, symmetrical, warm and cool, contrast. I tried to pull all the vintage elements that I liked, like floral motifs, but included more bold color choices to modernize things a bit. While I was designing, I opened the scanned files of the original hankies in Photoshop and tried to mimic some of the elements I wanted to keep and cut away elements I didn’t want to use.

The most important Photoshop tools I used were the Magic Eraser and the Replace Color tool. The magic eraser will delete swaths of similarly hued pixels, which I used to delete the white fabric that was scanned in.

I also used the Color Range tool, particularly on my floral design, because I wanted to keep the style of the flowers while adding my own spin with colors. For example, after cutting away all the excess design and background noise, I selected Color Range from the Select toolbar menu, then selected the yellow color in the flowers as the color to replace. All of the yellow colors were then selected and I could replace the color consistently and easily.

I have to admit, it was hard to choose just one design style … so I didn't. I did manage to narrow it down to three varieties: a grid-like design with dotty accents, a feminine floral and a color-blocked, retro design. To further narrow down our design theme, I chose warm and cool colorways that reminded me of some of the vintage hankies from Kim’s collection.

The voile is perfect for hankies because it’s soft and lightweight, and very gentle on a tender nose. Jennifer sized each handkerchief at a generous 16 inches square and included a half-inch seam allowance around each hankie. At first we worried that 16 inches might be too big, but when I measured some of my larger vintage hankies, I found that many of them were also 16-inches wide. Perfect, then! And surely if people’s heads and feet and bodies in general are a little larger now than they were then, maybe our noses are, too?

Jennifer: Kim and I both work in customer service, so when I realized I had the chance to explain how to create and size a master file containing six separate designs, I got pretty excited. The Spoonflower help desk gets that question pretty often and while it’s not the most complicated process, it does involve a few necessary steps so that you don’t end up cussing out your computer screen (or worse, your printed fabric). See my tutorial on creating amaster layout using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

Kim: I use hankies almost daily, but I’ve never stitched them up myself. In looking at the finishing on some of my vintage versions, there were lots of different hem options. I decided to try a few methods out, and they all turned out well. Hemming dainty little items like these is a little futzy, but enjoyable if you like handwork like I do.

Two hankies had their seam allowances pressed down twice and blanket stitched, two had hand-rolled hems, and on two I used a decorative scallop stitch on my sewing machine, then cut away the excess fabric. (This latter was definitely the fussiest method of all, in part because I used strips of tissue paper to stabilize my stitching and be sure that the delicate voile wouldn’t be eaten by my machine. This paper then had to be torn away afterward. I specifically wanted to try this technique, though, because several of my vintage handkerchiefs are finished this way.)

Jennifer: In my opinion, the designs don't need to live and die by their final print. The prints themselves allow for the option of adding embroidery, particularly the plaid, dotty versions. Since it was so easy to replace and change colors, customization can continue for as long as you hang on to the original files. And thanks to Kim’s sewing prowess, a variety of hemming and finishing options added personality to otherwise square pieces of fabric. Finally, lest we forget actual functionality, each measures large enough to be knotted into a cute neck kerchief, bandanna, or even a pretty little doily. Or you can just wipe your nose without creating waste. Versatile! Eco-friendly! What can’t a hankie do?

This is the eighth in a series of posts describing the projects that are part of our 2012 Spoonflower Staff Challenge. Voting begins on Thursday, March 15, 2012.

A QR code, or Quick Response code is a somewhat new technology that, when scanned by a smart phone or iPad app, takes you to a website or texts you with more information about a product. You see them everywhere now, from cereal boxes to bus stops. From the moment Jake got his new phone, he was obsessed with them. I remember he used to talk about how production at Spoonflower could be more efficient if we could just walk around scanning QR codes to look up orders and find out information about rolls of fabric. As for me, I just liked how they resembled little patchwork quilts. So when the staff challenge was announced, the idea of making a QR code quilt seemed perfect.

Our first step was to pick our QR code. Every web page has a corresponding code, so we had a lot of silly ideas about what site to choose. For loyalty’s sake we chose Spoonflower and with a simple free online code generator, Jake was able to print out an image of the QR code for the Spoonflower site. We used this as a guide for our quilt.

We wanted our quilt to be more than just a black and white grid--no cheater quilt for us! So we decided to make individual designs that would be cut up and incorporated into the larger QR code pattern. We each made two designs: one predominantly black, and one mostly white. Looking back, we realize we could have used any two colors with a high contrast, but the QR codes we are familiar with are black and white, so that’s what we did. Keeping with the code theme, each one of our designs features a different code of communication, and each one spells — can you guess? ...Spoonflower!

Jake chose to use binary code and smoke signals in his designs. And he wants you to know that you don’t even need a computer to make a fabric design! He drew his smoke signal design with a stylus on his iPad, using a program that would work on an iPhone too. (He of course needed a computer to upload the drawing to the website, however.) I’m pretty sure he became the first smoke-signal-fabric designer that Spoonflower has ever had. I made designs using Morse code and the semaphore flag alphabet. The night I made my Morse code design, someone actually ordered a swatch of it about an hour after I uploaded it! (I wonder if they know it spells Spoonflower?)

We chose Kona cotton for our quilt, because it’s so soft and easy to work with. The Spoonflower QR code is made of 625 squares (25 rows of 25) so for a roughly queen-size quilt, we printed 3 yards of each design and used 4-inch squares with a half-inch seam allowance. Jake and I argued about whether or not the quilt should be totally gigantic, but I think he’s glad we kept it somewhat small.

As soon as our fabric was printed and ready to go, however, tragedy struck. I broke my hand. If only my car accident had occurred after the Daytona 500, I would have known to let go of the steering wheel on impact! Sigh. I broke the fourth metacarpal in my right hand, and I’m right-handed. Still, I was determined to make this quilt, so I just sewed myself a cute cast cozy and started using the left-handed rotary cutter instead.

The next step was to cut the fabric into squares and plot the chart of how to sew them together. It seemed right that no adjacent squares should be the same design, so in order to plot the layout of all the squares, I drew a map on graph paper of how to sew the squares together. It’s like a code all on its own! It took a long time to make this chart with my left hand, but it was so useful during the sewing process.

Jake and I sewed the squares together into strips and then sewed the strips together. Jake sewed! This was the first time he had ever sewed, but it was perfect because what can be easier than sewing squares together?

Turns out that sewing machines aren’t as complicated as they look. After a few squares he was a natural. He even learned how to load a bobbin. Jake’s dog, Grace, a rescued Boxer, looked on with curiosity.

Grace helped us sort the strips of squares. A huge thank you also goes out to my mom because during this part of the process, she came to Spoonflower and helped Jake and I sew the rows of squares, trim the seams, and iron them.

My mom joked that the only time she sees me is when I need help with something, but I actually need her help a lot! My mom is a very talented crafter, and she inspires me in so many ways. I’m blessed to have her live so near! In fact, she would not let us give up when it was late and we’d been sewing all day. “I’m not leaving until I see the finished quilt top!” she said. “We have to scan it and see if it works!”

So Jake and I sewed like the wind and finished the top of the quilt. Then we held it up and he scanned it with his phone and... it took us to the Spoonflower website! Despite our sewing imperfections (I think some of the Morse code squares might be upside down) and tons of loose threads, it actually worked!

The next day we spread the quilt top over a backing made of plain Kona, with a layer of batting in between, and my mom helped us pin it all over with safety pins.

Pin basting helped us keep it all together so we could sew it without a quilt frame. The next step was to sew down each seam, through all the layers of the quilt, both vertically and horizontally. For all you real quilters, please do not be horrified. This was a quick quilt, renegade style. A close inspection of our handiwork is not recommended! However, this quilt does two things: it takes you to the Spoonflower website and it keeps you warm. What more could a person want?

The very last step was to fold up the edges of the Kona backing around the sides of the quilt top and sew through all the layers. Gart saw me doing this part, and it was his first glimpse of the quilt. “I’m geeking out!” he said, incredulous that it actually was a scannable QR code in quilt form. Yes, it’s a melding of very old and very new technologies. We hope you like it! Meanwhile, Jake will be taking a nap in it.